Buried in the
announcement of its new flagship phone, LG's Nexus 4, is the
news that the device won't connect to LTE. Instead, the phone is
stuck on HSPA+ networks, which some carriers still label
4G, but tend
to run a lot slower than LTE.

Android head Andy Rubin calls the lack of LTE a "tactical issue,"
and cites cost and battery life as major concerns with devices
that have to support multiple radios. "A lot of the networks that
have deployed LTE haven't scaled completely yet — they're hybrid
networks [...] which means the devices need both radios built
into them," he said. "When we did the Galaxy Nexus with LTE we
had to do just that, and it just wasn't a great user experience."
But the reality now is that many LTE devices — including the
iPhone 5 and the LG Optimus G,
which shares common hardware with the Nexus 4 — use larger
batteries and newer, more efficient chips to balance the power
draw from LTE.

What it boils down to is this: Google still doesn't have the
muscle to convince carriers to sell its Nexus phones right off
the bat. And it's not willing to negotiate with carriers to bring
the best possible hardware to consumers.

There's no getting around it, this is a big embarrassment for
Google. Although the carriers are mostly to blame, the bottom
line is that Google's new flagship phone for the next year will
be outdated hardware the moment it's released.